EA Forum

From http://effective-altruism.com/ea/54/show_me_the_harm/:

"Finance is often taken to be the legal high earning career that’s most harmful to society. The average Goldman Sachs employee earns around $500,000 per year. If someone joined Goldman and donated half of his earnings to Against Malaria Foundation, that would be about enough to save 100 lives per year (or more accurately, saving 4000 QALYs), plus likely have substantial positive flow-through effects. For Earning to Give at Goldman to be net harmful, the marginal employee would need to be causing the death of a hundred people each year. This would mean that Goldman Sachs employees are several orders of magnitude more deadly than American service people in Iraq.

Goldman has 32,000 employees. An upper bound for the harm caused by the marginal employee is thus the total harm caused divided by 32,000. For the harm to outweigh the good, Goldman would therefore have to be killing at least 3.2 million young people each year, or doing something else that is similarly harmful. That would mean that Goldman Sachs would need to be responsible for around 5% of all deaths in the world. Bear in mind that Goldman Sachs only makes up 22% of American investment banking, and 3% of the American financial industry - if the rest of finance is similarly bad, then it would imply that finance is doing something as bad as causing all the deaths in the world."

It's not letting me edit my comment, so I'll post this separately.

I can't help but feel that accusing me of "selective quoting" is just a tactic used to deflect a true observation. As far as I can tell, the most well-known EAs who have commented on wild animal suffering have unilaterally come out in support of Tomasik-like conclusions, e.g. CEA's CEO William MacAskill has written an article called "To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators (especially Cecil the lion)", and 80,000 Hours director Rob Wiblin has written a blog post called "Why improve nature when destroying it is so much easier?" (https://archive.fo/HbE2a). This has also been my experience in online EA communities, such as the EA Facebook group. I can think of dozens of articles written by prominent EAs supporting habitat destruction, but only one opposing it (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/14l/the_unproven_and_unprovable_case_for_net_wild/).

Since there's no robust evidence (eg surveys) on EA views of wild animal suffering, this is the best evidence available.

> have the EA people actually done something so far?

In terms of stuff done: OpenPhil, an EA org, has given north of $30million to groups researching strong AI and its risks[0]. Some effective altruists also choose to donate to AI research groups like MIRI[1].

Why would stopping a botnet be evidence of effectiveness at tackling strong AI? Botnets don't exhibit any kind of intelligence as far as I'm aware.

0. http://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants

1. http://effective-altruism.com/ea/14c/why_im_donating_to_miri_this_year/

This is a really tricky issue; there are lots of competing considerations either way. (e.g. the return you get from your money; but your donated money also generates a 'social return', which can be much higher than what you get in a bank. And you'll learn more about how to do good later on; but the world is also getting richer so there might be fewer outstanding opportunities in the future. Etc etc.) There's a summary of blogposts on the topic here: http://www.effective-altruism.com/ea/4e/giving_now_vs_later_a_summary/

Unnecessary for your personal survival? That's true, but it's a very limited perspective to take. Cockroaches are known to affect our species' health adversely (e.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11240940). If you wish to reduce their and other insects' unnecessary suffering without compromising the interests of humans, a better thing to advocate for is that we use more humane pesticides (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/nx/humane_pesticides_as_the_most_marginally/), not that we refrain from killing them.

I've been thinking about this a bit. I think we need to get better intelligence augmentation. We are limited in what we can produce, because we are limited in what we can manage. So we need to improve how much we can manage.

I'm thinking about it in terms of improving autonomy

http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1cm/autonomy_a_search_for_a_measure/

I've been trying to find a community. But it seems pretty diffuse.